Posts tagged “EPA”

Posted on June 25th, 2012

On February 21, 2012, the SCOTTS MIRACLE-GRO COMPANY pleaded guilty in Ohio to eleven FIFRA violations. Scotts admitted to illegally applying an insecticide to its wild bird food products that is toxic to birds, falsifying pesticide registration documents, distributing pesticides with misleading and unapproved labels, and distributing unregistered pesticides, all in violation of FIFRA. Scotts also admitted that in an effort to protect its bird food from insect infestation, the company applied to its line of wild bird foods the pesticides Storcide II and Actellic 5E, neither of which were approved by EPA for use in bird foods, the former bearing the warning, Storcide II is extremely toxic to fish and toxic to birds and other wildlife. Scotts continued to sell the products for six months after employees warned management of the dangers…

Posted on June 13th, 2012

The mining of coal in WV is being done according to federal laws. If it doesn’t look pretty, don’t look. When they are done, the forests will take over again. Pa was logged from border to border. It has more trees now then ever and is still being logged, just in a different way. The forests will take over again, but there are quite a few studies that conclude that full reforestation of a mine site may take hundreds of years, and of course the mountain tops will never come back. But my point was not that things don’t look pretty when the mines shut down. If you haven’t read my paper, here are the points I made: Mining counties are among the poorest in the…

Posted on April 17th, 2012

Recently an agricultural services firm was retained to spray the herbicide Milestone VM on nearby pastures to kill clover and other broadleaf plants. After spraying, rains washed some of the herbicide downhill from the pastures into the ponds below. Before the spraying, the ponds were full of tadpoles. A few days after spraying, there were no tadpoles in the ponds examined. Because none of the tadpoles had legs before the spraying, they could not have developed into adult frogs and walked off. Nor could any predator have managed to get every single one of them. And a “control group” — waterways not affected by pasture runoff — still had the tadpoles they had before this spraying. Adult frogs may have been killed as well…